Everything about Coeducation totally explained
Coeducation is the integrated education of males and females at the same school facilities. The opposite situation is described as
single-sex education. Most older institutions of higher education restricted their enrollment to a single sex at some point in their history, and since then have changed their policies to become coeducational.
Co-ed is a shortened
adjectival form of
co-educational, and the word
co-ed is sometimes also used, in the United States, as a noun to refer to a female college student. The word is also often used to describe a situation in which both genders are integrated in any form (for example "The team is co-ed").
Mixed schools in the United Kingdom
In the
United Kingdom, the usual term is
mixed, and today most
schools are mixed. In
England the first public mixed boarding school was
Bedales School founded in
1893 by
John Haden Badley and coeducational since
1898. The Scottish
Dollar Academy claims to be the first mixed boarding school in the UK (in 1818). Many previously
single-sex schools have begun to accept both sexes in the past few decades; for example,
Clifton College began to accept girls in
1987.
Coeducation in the United States
The first coeducational institution of higher education in the United States was
Franklin College in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, established in
1787. Its first enrollment class in
1787 consisted of 78 male and 36 female students. Among the latter was
Rebecca Gratz, the first
Jewish female college student in the United States. However, the college began having financial problems and it was reopened as an all-male institution. It became co-ed again in
1969 under its current name,
Franklin and Marshall College.
The longest continuously operating coeducational school in the
United States is
Oberlin College in
Oberlin, Ohio, which was established in
1833. The first four women to receive bachelor's degrees in the United States earned them at Oberlin in 1841. Later, in 1862, the first African-American woman to receive a bachelor's degree (
Mary Jane Patterson) also earned it from Oberlin College.
The
University of Iowa became the first public or state university in the United States to admit women, and for much of the next century, public universities, and land grant universities in particular, would lead the way in higher education coeducation. Many other early coeducational universities, especially west of the Mississippi River, were private, such as
Carleton College (
1866),
Texas Christian University (
1873), and
Stanford University (
1891).
At the same time, according to Irene Harwarth, Mindi Maline, and Elizabeth DeBra, "
women's colleges were founded during the mid- and late-19th century in response to a need for advanced education for women at a time when they were not admitted to most institutions of higher education"
(External Link
). A notable example is the prestigious
Seven Sisters. Of the seven,
Vassar College is now co-educational and
Radcliffe College has merged with
Harvard University.
Wellesley College,
Smith College,
Mount Holyoke College,
Bryn Mawr College, and
Barnard College are still
women's colleges.
Other notable women's colleges that have become coeducational include
Ohio Wesleyan Female College in
Ohio,
Skidmore College,
Wells College, and
Sarah Lawrence College in New York state,
Goucher College in Maryland and
Connecticut College.
In U.S. slang, "
Coed" is an
informal term for a
female student attending a formerly all-male college or university (or any university).
U.S. institutions of higher education coeducational from establishment
- Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania (1787) (began as a coeducational school but the co-ed policy was soon changed and it would take 182 years before women were again permitted to enroll in the school)
- Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio (1833) (usually credited as the first consistently coeducational school in the United States)
- Alfred University, Village of Alfred in western New York State (1836)
- Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina (1837)
- Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois (1837)
- Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, (1844)
- Olivet College, Olivet, Michigan (1844)
- Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin (1847)
- Waynesburg College, Waynesburg, Pennsylvania (1849) (first woman to receive a Bachelor's Degree in Pennsylvania in 1857)
- Urbana University, Urbana, Ohio (1850)
- Westminster College, Duke College New Wilmington, Pennsylvania (1852)
- Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio (1853)
- Hamline University, Red Wing, Minnesota (1854)
- Bates College (1855), Lewiston, Maine (first woman to receive a bachelor's degree in New England in 1869)
- University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa (1856)
- Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas (1863)
- Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (1865) (first woman enrolled in 1870, first woman graduated in 1873)
- Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota (1866)
- University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California (1868)
- Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts (1869)
- Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania (1870)
- Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York (1870)
- Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas (1873)
- Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas (1876)
- Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts (1880)
- Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1881)
- University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona (1885)
- Pomona College, Claremont, California (1887)
- The College of Idaho, Caldwell, Idaho (1891)
- Stanford University, Stanford, California (1891)
- University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (1892)
- Reed College, Portland, Oregon (1908)
- Rice University, Houston, Texas (1912)
- Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York (1946)
- Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (1948)
- Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California (1955) (first woman graduated in 1960)
- Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1965)
- University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California (1965)
- Virtually all of the thousands of institutions of higher education that were founded after Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 are coeducational, and so are not listed.
Years U.S. educational institutions became coeducational
» Schools that were previously all-female are listed in
italics.
Coeducation in Canada
Years Canadian educational institutions became coeducational
Coeducation in mainland China
The first coeducational institution of higher learning in
China was the Nanjing Higher Normal School which was renamed
National Central University in
1928 and
Nanjing University 1949. For thousands of years in China, education, especially higher education, was the privilege of men. In the 1910s women's universities were established such as
Ginling Women's University and
Peking Girl's Higher Normal School, but coeducation was still prohibited.
Tao Xingzhi, the Chinese advocator of coeducation, proposed
The Audit Law for Women Students (規定女子旁聽法案) on the meeting of Nanjing Higher Normal Institute held on December 7th, 1919. He also proposed for the university to recruit female students. The idea was supported by the president
Guo Bingwen, academic director
Liu Boming, and such famous professors as
Lu Zhiwei and
Yang Xingfo, but opposed by many famous men of the time. The meeting passed the law and decided to recruit women students next year. Nanjing Higher Normal Institute enrolled eight coeducational Chinese women students in 1920. In the same year
Peking University also began to allow women students to audit classes. One of the most notable female students of that time was
Jianxiong Wu.
In 1949, the People's Republic of China was founded. The government of PRC has provided equal opportunities for education since then, and all schools and universities have become coeducational. In recent years, however, many female and/or single-sex schools have again emerged for special vocational training needs but equal rights for education still apply to all citizens.
Co-education in Hong Kong
St. Paul's Co-educational College was the first co-educational
secondary school in
Hong Kong. It was founded in
1915 as St. Paul's Girls' College. At the end of
World War II it was temporarily merged with
St. Paul's College, which is a boys' school. When classes at the campus of St. Paul's College were resumed, it continued to be co-educational, and changed to its present name.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Coeducation'.
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